Charles Fishman
Charles Adès Fishman is an award-winning poet, known for his memorable imagery and sensitivity to the depth of human experience. He completed a Doctor of Arts degree in contemporary American poetry and poetry-writing at SUNY Albany in 1982, and received a Fellowship in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1995.Fishman co-founded the Long Island Poetry Collective in 1973, and created the Visiting Writers Program at Farmingdale State College in 1979. He was the founder and coordinator of the Paumanok Poetry Award competition, and series editor for the Water Mark Poets of North America Book Award. He is currently poetry editor of PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators.
His poems, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in more than 350 journals, and in such major anthologies as The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy (Iowa University Press, 2006); Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Northwestern University Press, 1998); and Carrying the Darkness: The Poetry of the Vietnam War (Avon, 1985).
His books include In the Path of Lightning: Selected Poems (2012), Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (2007), and Chopin’s Piano (2006), all from Time Being Books; Country of Memory (Uccelli Press, 2004); and The Death Mazurka (Texas Tech University Press, 1989), an ALA/Choice “Outstanding Book of the Year” that was nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His two most recent collections are Water under Water (2009) and In the Language of Women (2011), both from Casa de Snapdragon.
Among his awards are the 2014 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award for Poetry; Paterson Awards for Literary Excellence in 2007, 2010 and 2012; the New Millennium Prize for Poetry in 2012; the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize of the Southern California Anthology in 1996; and the 1987 Gertrude B. Claytor Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America.
Dr. Fishman is widely known for his brilliance as a teacher and editor, and for his powerful readings. He has appeared with Robert Creeley, Carolyn Forché, David Ignatow, Stanley Kunitz, Alicia Ostriker, Marge Piercy, William Stafford, C. K. Williams, and other writers in the vanguard of American poetry.